We were happy to be in town and to be able to participate in the annual Deerfield Beach Pier clean-up again this year. Held on a Saturday in June, this annual even is an opportunity to both do an interesting dive under the pier (normally you cannot scuba dive within 300ft of a pier in Florida) and to give back by helping to remove harmful debris from the ocean.
The Deerfield Beach Pier is normally open 24/7 and it’s a rare event for it to be closed. Through collaboration with the city of Deerfield Beach, the local police and fire departments, they close the pier for the cleanup allowing an army of volunteers to descend upon it to pick up fishing line, lead weights, hooks and whatever else may have fallen off or been tossed from the pier.
This year, instead of using a mesh bag for debris collection, we brought along a large mayonnaise jar which we could drop debris into. We’ve had problems with the mesh bags due to hooks getting caught in the fabric. We also wore our dive gloves and brought along shears to cut any caught line and to coax out lead weights from crevices. This worked well and halfway through the dive we had collected over 20 pounds of lead sinkers, hooks and monofilament fishing line.
In addition, we managed to see all kinds of little critters. Most seemed scared but many were curious about what was going on to attract all these funny looking creatures blowing bubbles and kicking around the sand. With the pier being normally off limits to divers these little guys may never have seen anything like us.
We saw a little octopus, a porcupinefish, and even a huge scorpion fish (reminding us to be careful where you poke around). All kinds of little blennies were poking out of their holes to check us out and schools of curious fish including many barracudas and lookdowns came and went.
Unfortunately, due to the pier being closed for renovation, there was no surface support. In prior years we would have volunteers lowering buckets into the water allowing us to drop our debris into the buckets and to continue our collection. My husband had to inflate his BC just about all the way as he carried 20+ pounds of weight in our full mayonnaise jar to get it ashore.
We had also donated a couple of DRYFOB waterproof containers for car keys to the raffle held by DxDivers which is an additional incentive for all the volunteers. There were a lot of door prizes this year and our friends Tyler and Michelle drew tickets and shouted out numbers for well over 30 mins. Another way for us to say thank you to the store for carrying our DRYFOBs (they were the first local dive shop to resell them). It’s also great exposure for us allowing more people to find out about the product.
We were happy to be a part of the event and to get another dive under the pier. We saw many old friends and also made some new ones.
There was an interesting booth for a company that makes jewelry out of lionfish spines. NSU was there with a turtle conservation program and had various turtle shells and skulls in their booth. PADI was also there, and Divers Alert Network provided the swag bags.
Debris removed, a success story for marine life!
Divers and volunteers participated and collected hundreds of pounds of lead weights, fishing line and debris. Final tally to come.
After a week of torrential rains, the weather held, and we had a great morning diving for marine life.
Upcoming pier cleanups
We also plan to participate in the next Dania Pier cleanup (with Divers Cove on July 20) and the Pompano Pier cleanup (with DxDivers on September 7). We will continue to look for opportunities in the area to participate in these local volunteer events.